Minkewicz – Field Test

Sarah Minkewicz

For my field test I decided to use the technology we learned of the Facebook Bot. I’m going to attempt to create a bot that will give you up to date information and news on what past alums who have graduated from Newhouse are up to, where they worked before and how you can get in contact with them. For the reporters I also want to include links of some of their work and maybe social media accounts, and if the station they are working at has any job openings. I’m not sure this is even going to work and I have my doubts but I really want to give this a shot.

The main purpose for this robot is to help connect people looking to network for a possible job.

I haven’t tried embedding links to the robot so I think I’m going to start there. I think the easiest think would be embedding links from new websites and the bios of any alums that work there. That way it would have the ability to send to the person talking to it up to date information even if it can’t exactly to them what’s going on it self. Also from that point the user can navigate through those links and find what it wants in cases where the bot becomes on responsive.

I know there are Newhouse people all over the place so I think I’m going to start by looking up people who are working in Syracuse. For time purposes and because there’s a lot of bios to look into, I’m keeping it to Channel 9, CNY Central and Spectrum News. I might throw in the radio stations but I’m not sure yet.

After about an hour of going through people’s bios I finally got through the whole list! I knew there were Newhouse people working in Syracuse, but I found a lot more than I thought I would. I probably pulled about 20 names for those 3 different stations.

Just finished adding in everyone’s bios that I found. I also threw in some normal conversation ques to make the robot a little more interactive. Right now I think it’s a good time to test out the bot and see how others respond to it and if I need to make some more adjustments.

One down side to this Bot that I didn’t consider until now is that it’s going to have to be updated every few months because people might not work at those stations anymore. Another downside I found while creating this bot is that although I list what reporters work where, I did have info for the people that work behind the scenes, such as producers.

Over all I think the bot serves it’s function on a simple level. If anything it takes the time away from having to look at all the bios of the reporters in the area to see which ones graduated from Newhouse. Adding their individual contact information was a lot more difficult then I thought it would be. For the people that tested out the bot it just didn’t seem to work out too well. Perhaps it was information over load. I might consider working on this some more because I think it does have great potential of being a resource for people looking to reach out to Newhouse people and make that networking connection.